Our research mission

Research in our department has real-world impact that improves the lives of people in all walks of life:

• Transforming the lives of those suffering visual stress - Can tinted lenses help sufferers of visual stress?
• Improving the lives of military veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - An alternative to traditional therapy has been developed at Essex to help veterans with PTSD.
• Making smart meters more effective at reducing household energy consumption -Smart meters are seen as a key tool that will persuade households to reduce energy consumption. But psychologists from our department have discovered it's not as easy as companies and government believe.

Our academics publish papers in a range of journals related to their areas of interest. Some of our papers include:

• Making sense of misfortune: Deservingness, self-esteem, and patterns of self-defeat (Mitchell Callan, Aaron Kay, Rael Dawtry.)
• The neural basis of somatosensory remapping develops in human infancy (Silvia Rigato, Jannath Begum Ali, José van Velzen, Andrew J. Bremner.)
• The role of explicit categorization in the Implicit Association Test. (Motonori Yamaguchi, & Geoffrey Beattie.)
• The highs and lows of a cultural transition: A longitudinal analysis of sojourner stress and adaptation across 50 countries (Kali A. Demes, Nicolas Geeraert.)
• Attitudes, Habits and Behavior Change. Annual Review of Psychology. (Bas Verplanken, Sheina Orbell).

Our researchers frequently appear in national and international press and contribute articles to The Conversation:

• Have you heard the term "ASMR" but don't know what it means? Dr Giulia Poerio writes about what we know about this unique brain phenomenon - and what we don't.
• Feeling a bit bored? Dr Wijnand Van Tilburg takes a look at the history of boredom, and some of the science behind it.
• Dr Veronica Lamarche wrote about "How do you know when it's time to break up?"
• "Do blind people have better hearing?" Dr Loes Van Dam discusses the long-term effects of visual loss on the brain, and how it adapts to make the most of the data it receives from other senses.

In the last five years we have invested in facilities of the highest quality.

• We have continued to invest in our Centre for Brain Science, with over £300k spent on equipment and software over the past two years to ensure our researchers have access to the tools they need.
• We also have excellent facilities for electroencephalography (EEG) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), with multi-method equipment.